#fictional-characters

#fictional-characters

By Jan Wahl-
Just when I thought I couldn't have more respect for Lady Gaga, she made an artistic choice at the Oscars that blew me away.She at first appeared in the audience, dressed and made up beautifully, as only Gaga can.Less than a half hour later, she appeared onstage, completely sans makeup, in jeans and a t-shirt.

Popular baby names are tempting, aren't they?At the height of their popularity, the names of celebrities, fictional characters, and cultural icons seem to have an outsize beauty, power, and influence.Surely Game of Thrones couldn't do anything to ruin the great name of Daenerys, right?For parents interested in bucking baby-naming trends, baby names plucked from popular culture can have a one-of-a-kind ring to them... unless thousands of other soon-to-be-parents are thinking along the same lines.

Female novelists seem to be getting a bit of a bashing these days.Some literature courses offer trigger warnings for anyone frightened by the toxicity of Jane Eyre or Northanger Abbey.Tom Rachman's The Imposters doesn't let them off too lightly either.His first novel, The Imperfectionists, focused on journalists.

This month's mix of titles leaving Netflix in the United States include two coming-of-age comedy dramas, a twisty thriller throwback, a wrenching Holocaust documentary and two uproarious comedies (one of them smuggled into an animated family film).Give them a stream before they're gone.(Dates reflect the last day a title is available.)

Russell Banks' 1985 breakout novel, Continental Drift, was a Pulitzer Prize finalist.He's pictured above in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, in December 2007.Thony Belizaire/AFP via Getty Images American novelist and activist Russell Banks died on Sunday of cancer at the age of 82.Banks built an A-list literary career writing about working-class families and immigrants who struggle on the margins of American life.

Works by Andy Warhol are to be shown in Dublin as part of Ireland's largest display of pop art.
he Pop Art Pioneers exhibition at Gormleys will showcase 2 million euro worth of works by Warhol and fellow US artists Roy Lichtenstein, Keith Haring and Robert Indiana.It will feature Warhol's silkscreen portraits, Lichtenstein's The Den, Haring's graphic designs and Indiana's LOVE artworks.

Most kids say and ask whatever comes to mind, and such was the case for book author Justin Kymberly Machelle Cloud when it came to inspiration for her first book in a series titled, The Adventures of Blu Pigtails: The Invisible Germ Bugs.Oakley author J. Kimberly Cloud wrote her first children's book in a series, The Adventures of Blu Pigtails: The Invisible Germ Bugs, about the importance of kids washing their hands.

Microsoft's Bing AI is hiding a "Celebrity" mode that can impersonate notable public figures in its answers, BleepingComputer reports, an early sign that the company could be looking to expand on the AI's uncanny ability to entertain - rather than inform - users.A simple request to turn on "Celebrity mode" prompts Bing Chat to imitate a household name of your choosing.